Word: kashgar
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...past decade has seen a string of bombings by suspected Uighur separatists - the U.S. has classified one organization, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, as a terrorist one - and stern crackdowns by the Chinese authorities. Around last year's Beijing Olympics, an attack in the historic Xinjiang town of Kashgar killed 17 Chinese police. But the region's most serious outbreak of violence took place in Urumqi over three days beginning July 5, when rioting left at least 156 people dead and over 1,000 wounded. (See pictures of race riots continue in China's far west...
...troops are preserving an unsteady peace, but for some that is not enough. "I'm afraid of people fighting each other," says a 22-year-old Uighur college student. He longs to go to another city in Xinjiang where the Uighur population is larger. "I want to go to Kashgar, Khotan or Aksu where it is safe. Right now a lot of people are leaving Urumqi...
...Despite an official ideology that recognized them as equal citizens of the communist state, Uighurs have always had an uncomfortable relationship with the authorities in Beijing. In 1933, amid the turbulence of China's civil wars, Uighur leaders in the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar declared a short-lived independent Republic of East Turkestan. But Xinjiang was wholly subsumed into the new state forged by China's victorious Communists after 1949, with Beijing steadily tightening its grip on the oil rich territory. Its official designation as an "autonomous region" belies rigid controls from the central government over Xinjiang...
...region, descending from the ancient Sogdian traders once observed by Marco Polo. Unlike many of the nomadic tribes of Central Asia, the Uighurs are an urban people whose identity crystallized in the oasis towns of the Silk Road. A walk through the bazaars of old Uighur centers such as Kashgar, Khotan or Yarkhand reveals the physical legacy of a people rooted along the first trans-contintental trade route: an astonishing array of hazel and even blue eyes, with blonde or brown or black hair - typically tucked beneath headscarves or the customary Uighur felt...
...China's approach to the region is captured in a recent plan to bulldoze much of Kashgar's historic Old City - an atmospheric, millennia-old warren of mosques and elaborate mud-brick houses - and replace it with a tourist-oriented theme park version, resettling its Uighur population (who were not consulted) in "modern" housing miles away from the city...